Who shuffles the threads?

There seems to be no rhyme nor reason for the ordering of threads any more. They're not ordered either by time-and-date of most recent post, nor by time-and-date of first post, nor alphabetically by subject, nor by any other moderately easily discernable order.

I can only assume somebody (or something) is shuffling them at random.

Who (or what) is doing it?

Please can they stop doing it, and put the threads into some sensible order instead?

It doesn't break anything - and while there are only 3 or 4 forum pages in total for a sub-forum then it's not a big deal - but it will become a big issue in the future.
So long as it's on the 'todo' list :)

...if by "works" you mean it presents you with a list of posts in some sort of most-recently-posted order.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do anything useful like limiting its results to the part of the forum you're presently viewing, or collapsing results by thread, so chances are you're in for a whole lot of paging through stuff you're not interested in which ever way you go.

If the posting rate stays anywhere near its current level, I figure this thread ordering issue will be a major one inside a day, and a critical one inside three days.

...if by "works" you mean it presents you with a list of posts in some sort of most-recently-posted order.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do anything useful like limiting its results to the part of the forum you're presently viewing, or collapsing results by thread, so chances are you're in for a whole lot of paging through stuff you're not interested in which ever way you go.

If the posting rate stays anywhere near its current level, I figure this thread ordering issue will be a major one inside a day, and a critical one inside three days.

It's not that way be choice, but fixing it will take time (it's annoying but doesn't actually break anything, so I suspect it will be lower priority than other issues).

I wonder if this is something that broke when the forum software was set up, or is it the way the programmer intended it to work? Either way, I can't say I'm very impressed. I'm struggling a bit, but I'm gradually figuring out how to read the forums as easily as I did the old one. There's just so many differences, and so many very handy features that just aren't there in the new setup.

What I don't understand is why the forums had to change at all. It seems like a, well, we're changing the store, might as well change the forums while we're at it since we think we should do it at some point in the future anyway.

but fixing it will take time (it’s annoying but doesn’t actually break anything, so I suspect it will be lower priority than other issues).

I actually think it should be the top forum-related priority; at the moment it's harder than hell to simply browse the forum looking for new posts that might be of interest. I don't think I've ever been on another forum that doesn't move active threads to the top of the first page...how difficult can this be to implement?

Fine if you want to look for something specific, but not a lot of use for keeping up with whatever things are on-going...

At present the practical options are:

1) Use "Newest posts" and accept that you're going to see stuff from everywhere including all the sections you're not interested in, and that you'll only catch maybe the most recent hour or two of stuff even so...

2) Go to the last page to see what's new, and miss updates that happen to older threads...

3) Plough through the whole lot looking for stuff that's new. The practicality of this approach will drop off dramatically as the number of threads increases. Two days in and we're already five pages down. That's getting to the sensible limit for scanning everything. By this time next week it'll be totally impractical. The poor folk who've got tthe job of keeping an eye on things will spend their whole time scrolling through pages and pages of lists of threads...

I agree that fixing the order of posts is top priority for the forums. I've deployed a few forums myself and usually the sort order is simply a setting that you can change. Daz's response makes me think this forum software is lacking functionality you can get with free or open source solutions :(

I started a thread at the Commons to give everyone a chance
to offer constructive suggestions.....but can't find it, and my post was added to another similar thread
(with no note to explain), which I also do not have a clue where it is.....very disorienting and disconcerting.

They do the same d&%* thing at Home Depot & the super-markets, re-arranging all the merchandise so you have to
hunt for everything all over again!

Very disruptive! :P

Taking a sabbatical till the dust clears.

Cheers

(edit: found an email that a moderator had merged my thread with another. Would have been good if DAZ
simply created a sticky asking for constructive suggestions to keep it all together ;-)

If one of your threads is merged with another you should be getting an email - unfortunately emails are getting blocked or lost for a lot of us (I get forum emails, but no order confirmations or GC codes).

Thanks for the link......I did see it, but from the title & content, it appears to be problems DAZ is working on,
i.e. glitches, not an invitation to the users for their input on usability, e.g. layout, font color vs background, etc.

If the purpose was to get constructive feedback, it should have been titled, New forums suggestion box, as I did, but got merged with another thread instead.

There is a lot of grumbling already (well deserved, imho) but I was hoping there
would be a sticky created to invite suggestions.

Wendy has a poll going.....great.....I hope someone at DAZ is taking heed.

I agree that fixing the order of posts is top priority for the forums. I've deployed a few forums myself and usually the sort order is simply a setting that you can change. Daz's response makes me think this forum software is lacking functionality you can get with free or open source solutions :(

That's the thing. It seems like they decided to build a whole new forum in-house. Why do that if you don't have to? And if you insist on building a new forum on your own, why kill the old one before you get the new one working? It would be nice if somebody could just answer the question, "what were you thinking?".

Considering how limited the new store and forums are, I don't see how they are going to be able to incorporate most of the features from the old store/forums without a lot of custom code.

The only thing worse than trying to maintain an antique in-house coded solution is trying to customize an outside solution to provide similar functionality as that in-house solution. I've done both, and both are time consuming, frustrating, and simply ... not fun.

Well, there is one thing worse. When that outside solution could have provided much of the functionality as the in-house solution, but the company cut corners by purchasing the most limited options of the outside solution.

You're either going to pay through the nose to purchase what you need or trying to make that purchase do what you need.

And who ever came up with the phrase pay through the nose, and what exactly does that mean?!?

I'm sure you're right about store integration Richard, but there's much more to this place than the store, especially as Daz relies on the community to provide 95% of its support. Without good forum software (and this software is not good, nor is it even adequate) the community will struggle. People who are needed here for their contribution will get sick of the uphill struggle and drift away. It seems that some of the main inconveniences of the new forums aren't just "current problems - please bear with us" but software limitations that are here to stay. I'm thinking about things like notifications linking to the first page of a thread, rather than to the first unseen post. This is basic forum functionality, as are plenty of other things that are just plain missing. Not broken, waiting to be fixed - missing. That's different and it's worse. The forums are more than the playpen that just hangs onto the bottom of the store, they are what supports the store. It looks increasingly like Daz forgot that.

The other dimension of this that concerns me is the timing. Within three months of opening up DS for free and bringing masses of new people into 3D, Daz trashes its own store and forums, replacing them with something that works much less well. Think how much quicker all those new folk will drift away, not having had time to form any attachment to the place. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment and think about the message they've been given:
"Here's this cool software for free. It's complicated and you have to learn a completely new language but don't worry - now you're an artist. And because you're an artist, you'll need to buy all this content. No, the software doesn't have a manual but hey, it's free. We have this great community they'll will give you all the help you need. BANG. Well, that's the community gone but bear with us while we get the store working so you can buy more content. Yeah, yeah, the community's around here somewhere, and they'll answer your question. Go bother them. We're busy fixing the store."

It just looks like hucksterism. Now, I know that the store pays for the community. But it works the other way around too: the community pays for the store. And what pays for everything, after all, is customer good will. That's the vital capital that underpins the whole operation and it feels like Daz has vastly overspent it recently. There has been a desperate lack of strategy, obvious to anyone with even a little business knowledge. Worst of all, Daz has failed to address the two problems that it knows to be its biggest weaknesses: poor customer communications and habitual failure to deliver on its promises. They needed to be fixed before throwing the whole organisation into turmoil with a total infrastructure replacement. You had time to plan this and work out most of these problems before launch. Instead, you're building all the old problems back into the new structure, and I'm not talking about ropy store code. It's looking like Daz has just thrown away its best opportunity to fix Daz.

From a customer point of view, Daz looks like a company that spends all its time firefighting, existing in an unstable, hand-to-mouth state of panic. If there is a strategy behind the last twelve months or so, it's not translating into customer satisfaction. Obviously there are a lot of people who will claim they're delighted whatever Daz does. I can hear the phrase '30 day refund' being loaded into a defensive cannon and pointed at me, even as I type this. But there's so much more to good customer service than a good refund policy (it is a good policy - all credit to Daz for sticking with it) and the rest of it is suffering. Daz still seems frightened of having an honest relationship with its customers, which is a pity. The corporatism, unconvincing as it is, leaves a lot of people feeling like we're being farmed: we get given a little pen to stand in and get milked for our money and expertise. If Daz plans to rely on its customers to support each other, it needs to remember how that model works. It's entirely based on relationships, and Daz is getting to be bad at relationships because it's frightened to be honest, it fails to communicate, and it fails at keeping promises. Daz is proving to be the flaw in its own model, the least likely to meet its own principles.

Because I know the yes-people will tell me I should leave if I hate it so much here, I'll say why I stay. It's simply that I want a place to buy cool stuff, and hang out sometimes, learn stuff and help people, and make friends. This used to be the best candidate for that. Now, not so much. And having to fight the forum software just to maintain a conversation is one more inhospitality among a list of other recent ones. The most telling aspect of this, though, is something that's dawned on me over the last few days. I'm not especially disappointed that the forums are such a train-wreck because, this time around, I hadn't bothered to hope for better.

Pretty much exactly what I've been thinking the last few days, Lithomantis. You said it a lot better, and a bit more diplomatically (especially after the last few days) than I think I could, though... :roll:

Agreed. I looked at this from a new users perspective and I really felt sorry for them. I have been here for years and I find this new site a little intimidating. I do not "feel at home" like I used to. There needs to be a bit more focus. I also would not have locked the old thread, but keep it running along side this one so people would ease into the transition.